16 Jun 2012

Via practicale commerceYou can explore the impact
of social media on your site’s revenue using data that is already
available to you. None of this data is perfect, and none of it is
comprehensive. But when used together, the data can inform how and where
you invest.

Organic vs. Campaign-Driven Social Media

There are two distinct ways that social media can impact your business.

Organic impact.
Depending on your target customers and the products you sell, consumers
will talk about your brand and link to your site. Enabling social
plugins — i.e., Facebook Like button, Twitter Tweet button, Google+
button — on your product pages can facilitate organic sharing. Users
will also simply copy and paste URLs and link to your home page or your
blog posts in their online conversations. These conversations can raise
the awareness of your site, impact attitudes and perceptions of your
brand, and sometimes directly drive click-throughs and conversions.

Campaign-driven impact
The other way social media can impact your business is through specific
social media campaigns. These include offers that are promoted through
your own social media properties, but also include social media
advertising that promotes your site, your products, or specific offers.

Keep these two different aspects of social media in mind as you analyze social media as a traffic and revenue driver.
This
article focuses primarily on the organic impact of social media. The
campaign-driven impact should be managed like any other campaign that
drives traffic to your site: Include tracking tags in each link you
control, and assess the performance of each campaign using that data.

Social Media's Organic Referral Traffic

The
most directly measurable organic impact of social media is when an
order can be traced back to a click-through from a social media site.
These conversions occur on two levels.

Last interaction conversion.
A visitor clicks through on a link that is posted in social media and,
while on your site during that visit, he or she places an order. In
Google Analytics terms, this is a “Last Interaction Conversion.”

Assisted conversion.
A visitor clicks through on a link that is posted in social media and
does not immediately place an order. At some point, however, the visitor
returns to the site through some other means — such as a Google or Bing
search, or by typing in the URL of the site — and then makes a
purchase. In Google Analytics terms, this is an “Assisted Conversion.”

In
both of these scenarios, social media had some impact on the visitor’s
purchase. In many cases, though, other channels also influenced the
visitor’s ultimate decision to visit the site and place an order.
Focusing on precisely attributing which channel contributed what is a
good way to develop a headache, and to spend hours with no actionable
result.

However, assessing how much traffic and how many orders
involved a social media click-through — as well as how these change over
time as you proactively engage with social media — is a worthwhile
exercise.

Google Analytics has a number of features and new
reports that can help with this assessment. Start by looking at visits
from social networks. Remember, if little traffic is coming from social
media, then, by definition, there will be very few related conversions.

The "Traffic Sources » Social » Sources" report provides this data.

A simple listing of where your social traffic comes from is a good place to start.
Use
this report to identify links that are generating traffic. Consider
visiting those social networks, searching for conversations about your
brand and potentially assisting or engaging in the dialog.